Israel’s Use of White Phosphorus in Civilian Areas ‘Clear and Undeniable’

Amnesty International's fact-finding team sent to Gaza has found "prima-facie evidence" of white phosphorous use in the built-up civilian areas, "clear and undeniable".

"Yesterday, we saw streets and alleyways littered with evidence of the use of white phosphorus, including still burning wedges and the remnants of the shells and canisters fired by the Israeli army," said Christopher Cobb-Smith, a weapons expert who is in Gaza as part of the four-person Amnesty International team.

Donatella Rovera, Amnesty’s researcher on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories said that such extensive use of this weapon in Gaza's densely populated residential neighbourhoods is inherently indiscriminate. "Its repeated use in this manner, despite evidence of its indiscriminate effects and its toll on civilians, is a war crime," she said

"Artillery is an area weapon; not good for pinpoint targeting. The fact that these munitions, which are usually used as ground burst, were fired as air bursts increases the likely size of the danger area,” said Chris Cobb-Smith.

This is the Channel 4 News report:

Journalists' microphones turned off when Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni challenged in Washington

Also check out this little 'fascist' - her own words not mine - saying that the whoe of Gaza should be levelled. This shows the Israeli mindset.



Here's another one showing an Israelo soldies mindset: "We are humans They are animals":

Clinton (& Blair), NATO, Kosovo & Gaza

On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began Operation Allied Force against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. That evening, President Bill Clinton explained to the American people that the NATO air campaign was intended to avoid "an even crueler and costlier war"; "to prevent a wider war in Europe"; and to "seriously damage the Serbian military's capacity to harm the people of Kosovo."

Describing the Serbian Army's assault, he stated: "This is not war in the traditional sense. It is an attack by tanks and artillery on a largely defenseless people...Our mission is clear: to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's purpose so that the Serbian leaders understand the imperative of reversing course; to deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo and, if necessary, to seriously damage the Serbian military's capacity to harm the people of Kosovo. In short, if President Milosevic will not make peace, we will limit his ability to make war."
(President Bill Clinton, address to the nation, Washington, D.C., March 24, 1999)

Tony Blair had said much the same the day before, on 23 March 1999: "We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women and children from humanitarian catastrophe."

Blair described the emergency: "Let me give the House an indication of the scale of what is happening: a quarter of a million Kosovars, more than 10 per cent of the population, are now homeless as a result of repression by Serb forces... Since last summer 2000 people have died." (Blair: 'We must act - to save thousands of innocent men, women and children,' The Guardian, March 23, 1999)

No mention was made of Serbia's right to defend its ethnic population from attacks by the KLA, described by President Bill Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, as, "without any questions, a terrorist group.". Indeed George Robertson, then UK Defence Secretary and later NATO Secretary General, stated before the House of Commons that until mid-January 1999, "the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] was responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Serbian authorities had been". (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, Routledge, 2003, p.56)

Presumably, and to avoid charges of rank hypocrisy, we can now expect a NATO blitz of Israel?

Please see the latest Media Lens alert for a more in depth analysis here:

Moshe Dayan: The method of collective punishment so far has proved effective. & Good Bye Bush!

Another Moshe Dayan Quote:

"There is no more Palestine. Finished . . ."

• TIME Magazine (30 July 1973)

These quotes show the true aims of the Israeli criminals.

Also worth reading is Richard Silverstein's CiF article on the propaganda war being waged by the Israeli state:

"Hasbara spam alert: with Israel's foreign ministry organising volunteers to flood news websites with pro-Israeli comments, Propaganda 2.0 is here"

"The hasbara brigade strikes again! You always hear about Israeli attempts at media manipulation. Everyone knows it's going on but usually the process happens through cyber insurgents like those involved with Giyus (and its media monitoring software, Megaphone). Now, we know that the Israeli foreign ministry itself is orchestrating propaganda efforts designed to flood news websites with pro-Israel arguments and information."

Good bye Bush!

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe

I reproduce this Guardian article in full considering the importance of the person who wrote it and its content.

It is written by Avi Shlaim, Fellow of St Antony's College and a Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. In 2006 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy. Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy.

"The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.

Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.

Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.

America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.

As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.

Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.

It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.

The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".

To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.

Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.

The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.

A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.

No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.

This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so."

“This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza”

Doctor Mads Gilbert is a member of a Norwegian triage medical team present in the besieged Gaza Strip. This is an interview on CBS which proves that the Israeli criminal nazis are targeting civilians.

“We have been doing surgery around the clock. I just spoke to one of my colleagues … who had not been sleeping for three days and the hospital is completely overcrowded, we’re running six/seven ORs and there are injuries you just don’t want to see in this world. Children coming in with open abdomens and legs cut off. We just had a child who … we had to amputate both legs and the arm, and the only crime they have done is being civilians, Palestinians living in Gaza.

The relief now is not more doctors and more drugs, the relief now is to stop the bombing immediately. This cannot go on. It’s a disaster…

We came on New Year’s Eve in the morning - I’ve seen one military person among the … hundreds that we have seen and treated. So anybody who tries to portray this as sort of a ‘clean’ war against another army are lying. This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza.”

From The Times:

Amid the tidal wave of human misery swamping Gaza City’s central hospital a horrified Norwegian volunteer doctor found a minute to type a text message on his mobile phone to friends back home.

“We are wading in death, blood, and amputees. Many children. A pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything so terrible. Now we hear tanks. Pass it on, send it around, shout it out. Anything. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We are living in a history book now, all of us.” It was signed Mads Gilbert, one of two Norwegian doctors toiling relentlessly alongside exhausted Palestinian medics.

Please also see The Heathlander for a full run down.

B'Tselem questions Israeli account of attack

The Israeli military says it bombed a lorry which Hamas fighters were loading with rockets on Monday.

But an Israeli human rights group says civilians were killed as they tried to protect their goods.

Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel-Hamid talks to a Palestinian who says the vehicle was his and that it was being loaded with gas canisters by his family.

Holocaust in Gaza - We Demand an Israeli War Crimes Tribunal

israel* continues its slow holocaust of the Palestinian people. I say holocaust purposefully because that was the threat made by Matan Vilnai, Israel’s Deputy Defense [sic] Minister, from February of this year: "The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” In Hebrew, “shoah” refers to the Jewish Holocaust of the 1940's.

I support Francis Boyle's call for an Israeli War Crimes Tribunal: "United Nations General Assembly must immediately establish an International Criminal Tribunal for Israel (ICTI) as a "subsidiary organ" under U.N. Charter Article 22. The ICTI would be organized along the lines of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was established by the Security Council.

The purpose of the ICTI would be to investigate and prosecute Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against the Peoples of Lebanon and Palestine--just as the ICTY did for the victims of international crimes committed by Serbia and the Milosevic Regime throughout the Balkans."

The criminal regime in Tel Aviv has mounted its re-election campaign on this holocaust in an effort to outdo the criminality of the likud* party.

And according to the Times: "Within hours of Israel launching its offensive against Gaza, lobbyists, spin-doctors and public relations experts were mobilised to head off critical reaction around the globe...The Israelis have prevented foreign journalists from entering and reporting from Gaza, thereby limiting the scope of the coverage from the Palestinian side."

The BBC have just reported that the isaelis will not let them report from Gaza, they do not want the world to see their crimes.

Robert Fisk rightly points out: "it was instructive yesterday to hear a member of the American Enterprise Institute – faithfully parroting Israel's arguments – defending the outrageous Palestinian death toll by saying that it was "pointless to play the numbers game". Yet if more than 300 Israelis had been killed – against two dead Palestinians – be sure that the "numbers game" and the disproportionate violence would be all too relevant. The simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less than Israeli deaths."

The fact is that civilians are paying the price in Gaza.

This is Gideon Levy in the israeli* paper Haaretz:

"Good boys from good homes are doing bad things. Most of them are eloquent, impressive, self-confident, often even highly principled in their own eyes, and on Black Saturday dozens of them set out to bomb some of the targets in our "target bank" for the Gaza Strip.

They set out to bomb the graduation ceremony for young police officers who had found that rare Gaza commodity, a job, massacring them by the dozen. They bombed a mosque, killing five sisters of the Balousha family, the youngest of whom was 4. They bombed a police station, hitting a doctor nearby; she lies in a vegetative state in Shifa Hospital, which is bursting with wounded and dead. They bombed a university that we in Israel call the Palestinian Rafael, the equivalent of Israel's weapons developer, and destroyed student dormitories. They dropped hundreds of bombs out of blue skies free of all resistance.

In four days they killed 375 people. They did not, and could not, distinguish between a Hamas official and his children, between a traffic cop and a Qassam launch operator, between a weapons cache and a health clinic, between the first and second floors of a densely populated apartment building with dozens of children inside. According to reports, about half of the people killed were innocent civilians. We're not complaining about the pilots' accuracy, it cannot be otherwise when the weapon is a plane and the objective is a tiny, crowded strip of land. Our excellent pilots are effectively bullies now. As in training flights, they bomb undisturbed, facing neither an air force nor defense system. "

Meanwhile the israeli* criminals have tried to murder a former US congresswoman, British doctors and a Cypriot MP, and a CNN reporter, and their propaganda and lies have been exposed. First they claimed it was a 'terorist' vessel, then they said it was an accident: "the boat tried to outmaneuver an Israeli navy ship and crashed into it,". They didn't realise there was a former US Congresswoman and CNN journalist on board...





(* I refuse to dignify the terrorist state or its inhabitants with a capital letter)

Jewish terrorists in Hebron pogrom

Further violence from the Jewish terrorists and thieves in Hebron. The sheer chutzpah of these evil fanatics is evident for all to see. Not only do they have the nerve to use a many thousand year old fairy story as the basis for the naked theft of someone else's lands, they have been found guilty by their own racist justice system of forging the papers for the Orwellian-sounding 'House of Peace', and thus of the theft of the house from its Palestinian owners.



The violence has been described as a 'pogrom' by both the Olmert and a Haaretz journalist who witnessed it and received a settler rock on his head for his pains.

"As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term 'pogrom' to describe what I have seen," he said at the weekly cabinet meeting.

"We are the sons of a nation who know what is meant by a pogrom, and I am using the word only after deep reflection," the prime minister said, quoted by public radio.

The violence was so bad that the UN Security Council issued a non-binding statement on Friday that "welcomed Israel's evacuation of settlers from the compound in Hebron on December 4" but also "condemned the resulting settler violence, including against Palestinian civilians and property." The UN statement came a day after 250 settlers were forcibly removed from the Hebron compound by Israeli security forces acting on an Israeli high court ruling.

Not only did these terrorists shoot 3 Palestinian civilians, they also set fire to Palestinian homes.

But that was not all the violence. A member of the Israeli SS assaulted a young female photographer on assignment for the Israeli daily Haaretz, armed with a camera...as Haaretz itself commented

"During discussions between Haaretz and the army yesterday, the soldiers' version changed considerably. Some details, confidently reported in the first hours after the incident, turned out to be mistaken. Lies are nothing new: When a soldier gets into trouble, his comrades tend to cover for him.

The attack on Scheflan raises questions regarding what might happen when an ordinary civilian (a Palestinian, or sometimes a right-wing activist) is attacked under similar circumstances. The victim is sometimes turned into the perpetrator, without reference to what actually happened. "

There is a suspicion that this violence had as its motive an intent to set fire to the whole of the Middle East, as according to Haaretz "The violence included the desecration of Muslim cemeteries in Hebron and anti-Muslim graffiti on mosque walls in the city, as well as around Qalqilya and Ramallah...Civil Administration officers in the area quickly washed off the graffiti, before pictures of it could be obtained by the Qatari news station Al Jazeera. "

Meanwhile, the human rights organisation Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) issued its Annual Report in which they warned: "Basic human rights, such as health, a life of dignity, education, housing, equality, freedom from racism, freedom of expression, privacy and democracy are increasingly being violated in Israel...extremely worrisome trends at the center of which are violations of the most elementary human rights...reminiscent, in many and increasing ways, of the apartheid regime in South Africa"

Sheeple

NATO (read US) bomber pilots are either completly incompetent or are high on heroin. They could also enjoy killing...

According to RIA Novosti, the Russian news organisation: "NATO aircraft killed a flock of sheep in the Afghan province of Laghman, in a botched attack on Taliban gunmen, according to sources in the governor's office...The sources told reporters that NATO troops claim they were targeting Taliban warriors."

As Jason Ditz comments on the antiwar.comblog: "When the helicopters finished firing, 200 were dead. Not Taliban. Not even civilians. 200 sheep. Apparently at a time when the ability of NATO forces to determine the difference between civilians and combatants is in doubt, they decided to underscore their inability to tell the difference between fierce Taliban warriors and a flock of hundreds of sheep roaming the countryside."

Perhaps they thought they were Taliban disguised as sheep - or just sheeple...